CHAPTER 31
It was a clear late spring day with a gentle, lazy wind and a light swell undulating the surface of the sea. The sun, rising higher, burned away the morning mist and left the water sparkling under a blue sky. At dawn, the separate Grand Fleet battle squadrons had merged into a single huge formation, which was further enlarged by the arrival around noon of Admiral Jerram’s eight battleships and their escorts from Cromarty. Now the formation advanced in six columns abreast, four dreadnought battleships in each column, all zigzagging in unison every ten minutes for submarine defense. Eight miles ahead of the battleships, the eight old armored cruisers were spread widely to form a screen. The light cruisers and destroyers were stationed on either flank and astern. Because Jellicoe wished to conserve the limited fuel carried by his destroyers, the fleet was steaming at 15 knots.
On the ships, the crews relaxed; they had done this sort of thing many times before. A visitor to the fleet was impressed by the service of morning prayer on the battleship St. Vincent: “about a thousand bare-headed sailors standing erect in silence on the quarterdeck.” At 11:00 a.m. the crews were called to action stations for drills, then dismissed to routine painting and cleaning. Afterward, off-duty men gathered on the decks and turret tops to bask in the sun. The midday meal came and went. Officers off watch smoked or dozed in wardroom armchairs or went to their cabins to lie down. A Tiger midshipman, asleep in the sun on the battle cruiser’s quarterdeck, remembered later, “We did not appear to be expecting Huns, as we cruised along to the eastwards at no great speed.”
Jellicoe with the battle fleet and Beatty with the battle cruisers and fast battleships were both moving eastward. At two in the afternoon they would turn toward each other and, about an hour and a half later, meet and form a single immense formation. If there was any response from the enemy before then, Beatty, seventy miles farther south and nearer to Germany, would encounter it first. But as the hours passed, the belief grew stronger in the British fleet that the Germans were not at sea and that this would be simply another routine and useless sweep. Despite warnings that German warships had been assembling in the Jade, there had been no reports of enemy activity since the previous night.
At 12:48 that afternoon, a signal to Jellicoe from the Admiralty seemed to confirm this belief. That morning, Captain Thomas Jackson, Director of the Operations Division of the Admiralty, had marched into Room 40 and asked where directional wireless stations placed the call sign “DK,” used by Scheer’s flagship, Friedrich der Grosse. When he was told, “In the Jade,” he departed without saying or asking anything further. If “DK” was the flagship and the flagship had not sailed, it seemed reasonable to assume that the German battle fleet had not sailed. This was the assumption Jackson made and passed along to Oliver, who signaled Jellicoe: “No definite news of the enemy. They made all preparations for sailing early this morning. It was thought the fleet had sailed but directional wireless placed the flagship in the Jade at 11.10 a.m. GMT. Apparently they have been unable to carry out airship reconnaissance which has delayed them.” Given this information, Jellicoe reasonably assumed that if the assembly in the Jade had been a precursor to anything, it would be at most a battle cruiser raid and that Scheer was remaining behind, perhaps to steam out later to cover Hipper’s retreat.
A German ruse had succeeded, in large part because of the ignorance and arrogance of Captain Jackson. If, while he was in Room 40, Jackson had asked one more question, he would have learned that “DK” was the German Commander-in-Chief’s harbor call sign and that when Scheer went to sea, he disguised the fact by transferring it from Friedrich der Grosse to a shore wireless station at the entrance to the Jade River. Scheer had been employing this subterfuge since he took command and had used it in the Lowestoft Raid, which was when Room 40 became aware of the practice. Unhappily for Jellicoe, the Grand Fleet, and the Royal Navy, Captain Thomas Jackson exemplified those British naval officers who scorned such modern capabilities and techniques as deciphering secret codes. He made no secret of his contempt for the gifted civilians who broke codes in Room 40 and he rejected the idea that such people could contribute anything useful to naval operations. They were, in Jackson’s eyes, “a party of very clever fellows who could decipher coded signals,” but must never be allowed to interpret them. “Those chaps couldn’t possibly understand all the implications of intercepted signals,” Jackson had said. Naturally, his feelings were obvious to the codebreakers and they and the captain had as little to do with each other as possible; Jackson’s visit to Room 40 on the morning of May 31 was only his third. Therefore, when he asked the codebreakers a single, specific question, they gave him only a single, specific answer. If Jackson had told Room 40 that he wanted to know where “DK” was so that he could pass it to Jellicoe, they would have understood the meaning and significance of his question and told him that they were not saying that the High Seas Fleet flagship was in the Jade; only that the call sign was. Naturally, Jellicoe assumed that the Operations Division was competent and he accepted what they told him: that Friedrich der Grosse and the High Seas Fleet were at anchor. If he had known that Scheer was at sea, he would have increased speed and might have brought the Germans to battle two hours earlier in better conditions of light and visibility and with two additional hours of daylight in which to fight. The damage done by Jackson’s bungling rippled on disastrously through the day and night.
[Andrew Gordon, whose description and analysis of the Battle of Jutland are uncommonly thorough and balanced, abandons moderation when he characterizes Captain Jackson. “Ridiculous,” “angry,” “blustering,” “insufferable,” and “buffoon” are words he uses to portray this officer.]
When, at 4:40 that afternoon, Jellicoe received a signal from Beatty that he was actually in sight of the High Seas Fleet—which the Admiralty had told him was still in the Jade, 180 miles away—he lost all confidence in Admiralty messages. And that night, the Commander-in-Chief’s mistrust of Admiralty information about German fleet movements painfully affected what was to happen.
Beatty’s six battle cruisers were in two columns on a southeasterly course, followed five miles astern and northwest by the four superdreadnoughts of Evan-Thomas’s 5th Battle Squadron. His three light cruiser squadrons were spread out ahead to the southeast. Beatty’s orders were to hold this course until 2:00 p.m., when he would be 260 miles east of the Firth of Forth and on the Jutland Bank, off the northwestern coast of Denmark. Jellicoe then would be three hours away, but the Commander-in-Chief felt no anxiety about this gap. If Scheer and his battleships were not at sea—and he had been told that they were not—Beatty’s force of six battle cruisers and four superdreadnoughts was more than adequate in speed and gun power to cope with any appearance of Hipper’s battle cruisers.
At dawn, Beatty’s squadrons began zigzagging; on a signal from the flagship, each column of ships turned every ten minutes in unison 22 degrees to either side of the line of advance. The signal flags used were large: rectangular flags were eleven feet by nine feet, triangular flags fifteen by eleven. Still, flag signaling had practical limits imposed by distance, visibility, funnel smoke, and wind direction. With this in mind Beatty had instructed Tiger, the battle cruiser nearest to Barham, to repeat his flag signals to Evan-Thomas by searchlight. At 2:00 p.m., the wind remained low and the smooth sea was stirred only by the wash of bows and propellers. As far as the eye could see from Lion’s bridge there was no wisp of smoke or sign of ships except the British light cruiser scouting line spread eight miles ahead. At 2:10 p.m., Beatty hoisted the signal flags alerting his force to prepare to turn to the north. Five minutes later, the signal was hauled down, making the admiral’s declaration of intention a command, and the battle cruisers began their turn toward the Grand Fleet. At this moment, Lion was fifty miles west of Hipper’s flagship, Lützow, but the most extended flanking ships of the two cruiser screens were only sixteen miles apart.
When Beatty signaled his command to turn, not every ship in his force reacted immediately. Far to the northeast of the flagship, the British light cruiser Galatea on the port wing of the advanced screen had difficulty seeing Lion’s signal flags and so held on a few minutes before beginning her turn. During these minutes, the lookout on her starboard bridge wing suddenly called out, “Ship ahead blowing off steam.” Instantly, all binoculars on the light cruiser’s bridge were trained on the horizon 20 degrees off the starboard bow. There eight miles (16,000 yards) away was a stationary plume of funnel smoke against the sky. Even though Beatty’s signal to turn had now been received, the light cruiser’s captain decided to delay obedience and hold course to see what ship lay hove to over the horizon, and why she had stopped: one possibility was that a surfaced U-boat lay nearby and had sent a boarding party. Increasing speed, Galatea bore down on the smudge and soon a small merchantman appeared hull up. She was the Danish tramp steamer N.J. Fjord, blowing off steam from her boilers and rising and falling in the gentle roll of the sea.
Then, suddenly, the binoculars on Galatea’s bridge revealed something else: a low, gray shape coming out from behind the steamer’s hull: a German destroyer. A few moments later, a second destroyer appeared. The bugle sounded “Action stations” and the lookout’s voice came again, “Green two five [that is, 28 degrees off the starboard bow]. Cruiser . . . two cruisers.” At 2:20, Galatea sent a flag signal to the other ships in her squadron: “Enemy in sight.” Simultaneously, her wireless reported to Beatty: “Two cruisers, probably hostile, bearing east southeast, course unknown.” Then at 2:28 p.m., Galatea, now making 28 knots, opened fire with her forward 6-inch gun. It was the first shot of the Battle of Jutland.
Roughly the same sequence had occurred on the German side. In bright morning sunlight, the German fleet had steered west of Heligoland, heading north. Half the gun crews were at their posts; the other half slept in hammocks slung nearby. Georg von Hase, gunnery officer of the battle cruiser Derfflinger, rose, shaved, had breakfast in the wardroom, and returned to his cabin to write letters. By midday dinner, excitement was rising. “Nearly everyone agreed that this time there would be an action,” Hase wrote later, “but no one spoke of anything more important than fighting English light cruisers or old armored cruisers. As was always the case when we were on one of our sweeps of the North Sea, no one drank a drop of alcohol. . . . We smoked our cigars, then I went to my cabin, lay down for a siesta and watched the blue rings from my cigar.” At 1:00 p.m. the drums beat the daily signal to clean the guns. Then at 2:28, alarm bells sounded, the drums beat again, and boatswains piped and shouted, “Clear for action!” This was not a drill.
By this time—2:30 p.m.—Scheer and the main body of the High Seas Fleet were well to the northwest of Horns Reef, with Hipper’s battle cruisers fifty miles in advance. Spread ahead of the battle cruisers in fan formation were five light cruisers and numerous destroyers. Captain Madlung of the light cruiser Elbing, on the western edge of Hipper’s screen, had seen the Danish freighter’s smoke and sent two destroyers, B-109 and B-110, to investigate. Overtaking the freighter, the destroyers signaled her to stop and each destroyer lowered a boat with a boarding party to check her papers and cargo. While the boats were in the water, the destroyers sighted smoke to the west and, soon afterward, approaching warships. Urgently recalling their boats, the destroyers broke away from the tramp steamer. When Elbing and her sister light cruisers hastened to their support, the battle began.
Beatty’s mind was on other things when Galatea’s first contact report came in. Anticipating his scheduled rendezvous with Jellicoe, he had just signaled Evan-Thomas, “When we turn north look out for advanced cruisers of the Grand Fleet.” Evan-Thomas had acknowledged the signal and Barham and her three sisters had just executed the turn. Nevertheless, Beatty’s reaction to Galatea’s report was characteristically quick. At 2:32, he ordered “Action stations,” increased speed to 22 knots, and turned southeast in an effort to get between the enemy ships and Horns Reef. His new course, signaled by flag hoist to his entire force, was not the one that would most rapidly bring the enemy to action; rather it was the one that would compel the Germans to action whether they wished it or not. Nor, before doing this, did Beatty wait until he ascertained the enemy’s strength; remembering his experience of Hipper turning and legging it for home at the Dogger Bank, he simply turned and went at maximum speed. Indeed, he moved so quickly that he told Chatfield to put Lion’s helm over without waiting for his signal to be acknowledged by his other ships. The battle cruisers, their captains aware of Beatty’s impetuous style, dutifully followed Lion around and sped away to the southeast.
But the battleship Barham and her three giant sisters, five miles away on Lion’s port bow, did not follow. Five miles was an extended distance to read signal flags between moving ships at sea, even with the aid of binoculars. Moreover, as Beatty’s flagship continued to turn, the heavy black smoke pouring from her funnels shrouded the signal entirely. Inexplicably, Tiger, detailed to pass Lion’s signals along to Barham by searchlight, failed to do so. Evan-Thomas himself saw the battle cruisers turning, andBarham’s captain standing next to him urged the admiral to conform but Evan-Thomas had been schooled by Jellicoe strictly to obey orders. Accordingly, he waited for a specific signal from Beatty, and continued north. As Evan-Thomas said later, “The only way I could account for no signal having been received by me was that Beatty was going to signal another course to the 5th Battle Squadron, possibly to get the enemy light cruisers between us. Anyway, if he wished us to turn, the searchlight would have done it in a moment.” This mischance (after the war, the word used became “failure” and Beatty and Evan-Thomas would blame each other) was compounded when Tiger, assigned to relay Lion’s signals to Barham by searchlight, ignored this duty. Tiger’s excuse was that the battle cruisers’ turn had placed her in the farthest, not the nearest, position from the 5th Battle Squadron and that, under these conditions, her duty to pass along signals by searchlight must certainly have lapsed. Thus, while Beatty rushed off to the southeast, Evan-Thomas’s superdreadnoughts continued on a course almost exactly the opposite. Seven minutes later Beatty realized that the 5th Battle Squadron was not following and he repeated by searchlight the order to turn to the southeast. By the time this was accomplished, Evan-Thomas was nearly ten miles away. In this manner, Beatty’s impetuous decision, coupled with the delay before Barham received his signal and Evan-Thomas’s refusal to act without it, combined to deprive the battle cruisers of the powerful support of forty massive 15-inch guns. When Beatty went into action a few minutes later, the number of his ships had been cut from ten to six and the striking power of his guns had been cut in half. Beatty could have reunited his force by slowing his battle cruisers and letting the battleships catch up, but slowing down was not in David Beatty’s nature. Obeying impulse, he charged, leaving his battleships to make their way behind. In fairness, it should be remembered that Beatty still had seen only German light cruisers; Hipper’s battle cruisers were twenty-five miles away from Lion, and neither Beatty nor Hipper was certain of the other’s presence.
In Beatty’s force, the sounding of “Action stations” sent men running. A few were skeptical: in New Zealand’s wardroom several officers smiled knowingly and went out on deck to have a look. In many ships, tea was about to be served and those who had been on board any length of time thought first of food. On the light cruiser Southampton, Lieutenant Stephen King-Hall, dozing in the smoking room, jumped up and dashed to his cabin to set about his before-action routine: “putting on as many clothes as possible, collecting my camera, notebook, and pencils, and chocolate in case of a prolonged stay at action stations.” In Barham, a midshipman cast a wishful glance at the tea laid out immaculately on the gun-room table and wondered when he would get a chance to eat it. On Malaya,where the gun-room steward was just laying the table for tea, the midshipmen on hand scuttled etiquette and began downing as much food as possible. A turret officer in Warspite dashed into the wardroom, grabbed as much portable food as he could, and rushed off to his station. On Tiger, the chaplain, awakened from a nap, went to the wardroom to find out what was happening: “All the cups and plates were on the table but the room was empty. They had evidently been called away in the middle of tea. And suddenly.”
As British bugles sounded “Action stations” and German mess compartments thundered to the roll of drums, ships reverberated with swarming men and slamming hatch covers. Groups mustered at their stations where gas masks, goggles, and life preservers were issued. Damage control parties went through the ship wetting the decks and closing and dogging steel doors. In Queen Mary, a gunner’s mate checked to make certain his turret was ready with “urinal buckets, biscuits and corned beef, drinking water and plenty of first aid dressings.” Medical parties in dressing stations laid out surgical instruments, dressings, morphia, syringes, and stretchers. Fire hoses were laid out, glass windscreens on the bridges were removed, Union Jacks soared to the peaks of the mainmasts, and White Ensigns whipped from the yardarms and gaffs. Then came a stillness. Decks were deserted. No sounds came but the throb of the engines, the roar of ventilator fans, and, on deck, the splash of the sea against the hull. Most men were closed up in small steel compartments; in turret gun rooms, magazines, secondary batteries, conning towers, engine rooms, and bunkers. Out in the air on the bridges, admirals and captains, muffled in scarves and greatcoats, squinted through binoculars and walked in and out of the chart houses to study their positions on tactical compass plots. One captain wore irregular dress. New Zealand’s John Green had a green stone tiki pendant around his neck, and his waist was wrapped in a black-and-white flax Maori kilt called apiu-piu, both gifts presented to the ship by a tribal chief during the battle cruiser’s visit to the Dominion in 1913. Along with the gifts came the chief’s request that they be worn by the captain whenever New Zealand went into action; if this ritual was faithfully observed, he promised, the battle cruiser would not be seriously harmed. On this day, the news that the captain was wearing his necklace and his kilt spread reassurance among the crew. And when the Battle of Jutland was over, New Zealand, hit only once by a heavy shell, was the only one of Beatty’s six battle cruisers to suffer no significant damage and escape all casualties.
Sixty-five miles to the north, on the bridge of Iron Duke, there was a stir as Galatea’s first signal came in and positions were marked on the chart. A moment later, the short, brisk figure of the Commander-in-Chief appeared and Jellicoe bent over the chart. Only light cruisers were mentioned in this report. It could mean anything, but with the Admiralty’s assurance that Scheer’s flagship was still at anchor in the Jade, the Germans could only be light forces, and Beatty’s squadrons were more than strong enough to take care of them. Then, at 2:39, came a further signal from Galatea: “Have sighted large amount of smoke as though from a fleet, bearing east northeast.” Iron Duke immediately hoisted the signal for 17 knots. A few minutes later, another message followed: “Smoke seems to be seven vessels besides cruisers and destroyers. They have turned north.” Seven vessels besides cruisers and destroyers suggested battle cruisers. So Hipper was at sea! Jellicoe signaled for 18 knots and then for 19.
Galatea’s report “Smoke seems to be seven vessels besides cruisers and destroyers” suggested battle cruisers to Beatty, too, and at 2:47 p.m., he ordered Engadine to send up a seaplane to find out exactly what lay over the horizon. Already that morning,Engadinehad advised Beatty of the limitations imposed by that day’s weather on aerial reconnaissance: “Sea suitable for getting off but not for landing. Impossible to distinguish where mist ends and water begins in coming down to sea. Will be all right if horizon clears.” Now, on receiving the admiral’s signal, the carrier came to a halt and a two-seat Short seaplane was pulled from her hangar and hoisted into the sea. At 3:08 p.m., only twenty-one minutes after Engadine received Beatty’s command, Flight Lieutenant Frederick Rutland (thereafter known as Rutland of Jutland) was airborne. Low clouds forced him to remain under a thousand feet in order to see anything on the surface, and visibility varied between one and four miles. Ten minutes later, flying northeast at 900 feet, he came to within a mile and a half of the German light cruisers Elbing, Frankfurt, and Pillau. They fired at him and the seaplane was surrounded by shrapnel, some of it bursting only 200 feet away. At 3:31, Rutland’s observer was able to wireless Engadine that he had seen enemy cruisers and several destroyers headed northwest. Then, at 3:30, while he was watching, the German force reversed course and headed southeast. Although the observer had to encode his messages before sending them, he managed to wireless Engadine four times over the next fifteen minutes. Three of these messages were received; Engadine, observing the ban on ship-to-ship wireless transmission, attempted to pass this news to Beatty and Evan-Thomas by searchlight, but failed. After a thirty-nine-minute flight, a fuel pipe ruptured and Rutland was forced to land. While sitting on the surface waiting to be picked up, the little floatplane was passed by a British light cruiser; from his back seat the observer tried desperately to semaphore the new direction in which the enemy force was steering. Soon, Engadine arrived, and at 4:00 p.m. the seaplane was hoisted aboard. This flight was the sum total of the part played by aerial reconnaissance on either side on the first day of Jutland.
[By late morning, the wind along the German coast had moderated sufficiently to allow airships to take off, and five zeppelins had gone up. Once airborne, however, they discovered that misty weather and low cloud cover over the North Sea precluded observation. They spotted neither of the two fleets and late in the afternoon, all zeppelins were recalled.]
The navies of the world’s first and second sea powers were now approaching collision. To the east were Hipper’s battle cruisers, the modern Lützow, Derfflinger, and Seydlitz, followed by the older Moltke and Von der Tann. To the west were Beatty’s four giant Cats,Lion, Princess Royal, Queen Mary, and Tiger, along with the earlier New Zealand and Indefatigable. Ten miles behind, Evan-Thomas’s Barham, Valiant, Warspite, and Malaya were straining to catch up. Less than seventy miles to the north, 100 ships of the Grand Fleet accelerated their progress south while, fifty miles to the south, Scheer’s main fleet, slowed by the presence of Mauve’s old predreadnoughts, moved steadily north.
Hipper, aided by the position of the sun, saw his enemy first. With the sun in the west, there, starkly silhouetted against the bright blue horizon, were two columns of large dark gray ships with tripod masts: Beatty’s famous battle cruisers. Meanwhile, his own pale gray ships remained indistinct against the hazy, overcast sky and misty horizon to the east. Calmly smoking his cigar, he immediately but erroneously signaled Scheer that the British battle fleet was in sight. A minute later, he correctly identified his enemy and, noting Beatty’s alteration to the east, understood that the British admiral meant to cut across his wake and block his homeward path. Recalling his light cruisers from the north at 3:28 p.m., Hipper reversed onto a southerly course, slowing to 18 knots to allow the smaller ships to catch up. In fact, Hipper’s intention in swinging around had a larger purpose than simply to prevent himself being cut off from his base. He meant to engage the British battle cruisers in a running fight, all the while drawing them down onto the High Seas Fleet coming up from the south. Thus, at this moment, both admirals keenly sought action: Beatty, who believed that he had caught Hipper alone and that his own six battle cruisers and four fast battleships powerfully outnumbered his enemy, meant at last to destroy this old antagonist. Hipper, believing that Beatty was alone, meant to tempt him into a running engagement, all the while drawing him down into the jaws of the High Seas Fleet coming up from the south. In the interim, as Beatty’s 13.5-inch guns outranged Hipper’s 12-inch and 11-inch, the German admiral knew that he must close the range as quickly as possible. Beatty, charging down at maximum speed with what he was certain was superior strength, seemed happy to oblige and the two lines, both steaming south at full speed, were gradually converging. In most histories of the Battle of Jutland, what happened during the next fifty-five minutes—3:45 to 4:40—is known as the Run to the South.
Lieutenant W. S. Chalmers on the bridge of Lion remembered that “it was one of those typical North Sea summer days with a thin white mist varying in intensity and having too much humidity for the sun to break up.” As the two forces drew nearer, officers on both sides admired one another. In the gunnery control tower of Derfflinger, Georg von Hase, the ship’s gunnery officer, adjusted his optical instruments to maximum power: “Suddenly my periscope revealed some big ships. Black monsters. Six tall, broad-beamed giants steaming in two columns. Even at this great distance, they looked powerful, massive. . . . How menacing they appeared, magnified fifteen times. I could now recognize them as the six most modern enemy battle cruisers. Six battle cruisers were opposed to our five. It was a stimulating, majestic spectacle as the dark grey giants approached like fate itself.” To the British, their enemies revealed themselves gradually: first smoke, then masts and funnels and upper works, then stern waves, white and high; finally large, light gray hulls, pale against the gray eastern sky. On board Tiger, an officer remembered “how splendid the enemy battle cruisers looked . . . their last ship in particular showing up wonderfully.”
At 3:45, 16,500 yards from the enemy, Beatty swung his ships into a line of battle. Lion, at 26 knots, was in the lead, followed at 500-yard intervals by Princess Royal, Queen Mary, Tiger, New Zealand, and Indefatigable. The four massive battleships, Barham, Valiant, Warspite, and Malaya, coming up at maximum speed, were closing the gap, down from ten to seven miles. Beatty now was certain that his own particular adversaries were going to be brought to action. His four Cats were several knots faster than Hipper’s fastest ships; the two older British battle cruisers and the four Queen Elizabeths—all capable of 25 knots—could almost match the older Germans. This day would be no repetition of the Dogger Bank, when Hipper began his race for home with a long head start. This time, ten fast British dreadnoughts, racing for a position to cut off Hipper from his base, could not fail to annihilate the five isolated Germans.
And yet, at that moment and afterward, even Beatty’s friends wondered why he took so long to begin his work. The 13.5-inch guns of his Cats outranged Hipper’s 12-inch and 11-inch guns by several thousand yards and he could have opened fire long before Hipper was able to reply. By waiting until the range had closed, Beatty denied himself a number of opening, unopposed, and possibly significant salvos. Ultimately, it was not Beatty, but his admirer Ernle Chatfield, Lion’s captain, who gave the order to open fire. “The enemy battle cruisers were rapidly closing us,” Chatfield wrote later. “The range receiver on the bridge showed twenty thousand yards. I was on the compass platform. . . . Beatty . . . was on his own bridge below me with his staff. . . . I wanted him to come on the compass platform and sent a mes-sage . . . [to him] that the range was closing rapidly and that we ought almost at once to be opening fire. . . . But I could get no reply; the Vice Admiral was engaged in an important message to the Commander-in-Chief. Eighteen thousand yards. I told Longhurst [Lion’s gunnery officer] to be ready to open fire immediately. The turrets were already loaded and trained on the leading enemy ship, Lützow. At 3.45 p.m., the range was sixteen thousand yards. I could wait no longer and told Longhurst to open fire. At the same time the enemy did so. The firing of the ship’s main armament of 13.5-inch guns was by double salvos of four guns each. . . . [Then] Beatty came on the compass platform.”
Meanwhile, on the admiral’s bridge of Lützow, Hipper stood and watched, his cigar clamped between his teeth. Commander Erich Raeder, his Chief of Staff, remembered “a moment of supreme tension as the great turrets rotated and the gray gun muzzles elevated.” In their turrets and control towers, the German range takers and gun layers watched the approaching British ships, sharp and clear against the sun. “The six ships, which had been proceeding in two columns, formed a single line ahead,” said Hase onDerfflinger.“Like a herd of prehistoric monsters, they closed on one another with slow movements, specter-like, irresistible.” Hase identified Derfflinger’s target as the Princess Royal, but he could not open fire without a signal from the flagship. “At last, there was a dull roar. . . . The Lützow is firing her first salvo and immediately the signal ‘Open fire’ is hoisted. In the same second, I shout ‘Salvos: Fire!’ and the thunder of our first salvo crashes out.”
The opposing battle cruiser squadrons, traveling on parallel southeastern courses, opened fire almost simultaneously. The Germans’ firing, coming in continuous ripples down their line, won immediate admiration from their enemies. The first salvos, bunched in groups of four projectiles, were only about 200 yards short. The next straddled Tiger, one shot short, two hits and one over, the two hits bursting with a tremendous crash of tearing metal. The German shooting was this good despite the fact, as Hase recorded, that his gunners had to contend with “dense masses of smoke accumulated around the muzzles of the guns, growing into clouds as high as houses which stood for a second in front of us like an impenetrable wall until they were driven away by the wind.” Eight miles away, Beatty’s ships also were driving through continuous curtains of spray and smoke that made it difficult for their gunnery personnel to see the enemy at all, let alone get his range. Because of this, for the first ten minutes every British shell sailed far over the German line, some even as much as three miles beyond. In addition, mistaken assignments added to British difficulties. Queen Mary and Tiger had missed Beatty’s signal for the distribution of fire and were shooting at the wrong ships. Correctly, Lion andPrincess Royalwere engaging Lützow, but Queen Mary, third in line, instead of aiming at Derfflinger, which was second in Hipper’s line, fired at Seydlitz, third in the German line. The result was that for ten minutes nobody troubled Derfflinger, a crack gunnery ship, which steamed happily along, her guns thundering salvos every twenty seconds as if she were at target practice. Meanwhile, Tiger and New Zealand both fired at Moltke, while at the rear of the two lines, Indefatigable and Von der Tann, the two oldest, smallest, and slowest of the battle cruisers, carried on a private duel, undisturbed.
The Germans, who had the advantage of better light, also possessed better range finders and gun sights. “The Zeiss lenses of our periscopes were excellent,” Hase reported. “At the longest distances, I could make out all details of the enemy ships; for instance, movements of turrets and individual guns which were lowered almost to the horizontal for loading.” Hipper’s ships found the range quickly. Four minutes after opening fire, Lützow hit Lion twice, while Derfflinger placed three 12-inch shells on Princess Royal. Tiger was hit once by Moltke, which then went to rapid fire and hit her again, then twice more. At the rear of the line, Von der Tann hammered Indefatigable. No one followed this more closely than Hipper on Lützow’s bridge. “His unruffled calm communicated itself . . . to all those on the bridge,” said one of his officers. “Work was carried on exactly as it had been in peacetime maneuvers.” Another officer reported that Hipper “could not be separated from the telescope. There was nothing which escaped him, nothing he forgot, and he personally issued orders even on matters of detail. Just before fire opened, the First Staff Officer and the Gunnery Officer were discussing the unfavorable fire distribution. Hipper intervened with the remark that this was his business. No one need worry about it.” Subsequently, he interrupted a conversation about the advisability of warning the squadron about the presence of British destroyers. “Hipper left his telescope for a second or two, turned around and said somewhat sharply, ‘I’ve seen everything, gentlemen, and will give the order when the signal is to be given.’ ”
War at sea was Franz Hipper’s “business,” and “unruffled calm” his natural state, but for a sixteen-year-old Malaya midshipman, at sea for only four months and now in his ship’s torpedo control tower, the battle was a unique and terrible experience. A turret only a few feet away began to fire, and “from this time on, my thoughts were really more like a nightmare than the thoughts of a wide-awake human being. I don’t think I felt fright, simply because what was going on around me was so unfamiliar that my brain was incapable of grasping it. Even now I can only think of the beginning of the action as through a dim haze. I remember seeing the enemy lines on the horizon with red specks coming out of them, which I tried to realize were the cause of projectiles landing around us, continually covering us with spray, but the fact refused to sink into my brain.” The midshipman could see the enemy, but, with a northwesterly wind blowing their own funnel and gun smoke back into their eyes, the range finders in the British ships were having a difficult time. To add to this, two flotillas of British destroyers, which had been astern, were racing to get into their proper place ahead of the large ships, and their funnel smoke added to the murk. Nevertheless, the 13.5-inch shells of Beatty’s Cats began to creep closer to their targets. “With each salvo fired by the enemy,” said Hase of Derfflinger, “I was able to see distinctly four or five shells coming through the air. They looked like elongated black spots. Gradually, they grew bigger and then—crash—they were here! They exploded on striking the water or the ship with a terrific roar. Each salvo fired by the enemy raised colossal splashes. Some of these columns of water were of a poisonous yellow-green tinge . . . these would be lyddite shells. The columns stood up for five to ten seconds before they completely collapsed.”
[Lyddite is an explosive made largely of picric acid, which is yellow.]
Eventually, at 3:55 p.m., when the range was down to 13,000 yards, Queen Mary scored two hits on Seydlitz, putting one of the waist 11-inch gun turrets permanently out of action. Four minutes later, Lion hit Lützow. Then Derfflinger was hit, the shell piercing a door with a glass window behind which a petty officer was standing and watching the battle. “His curiosity was severely punished,” observed Hase, “the shot severing his head clean from his body.”
At 4:00 p.m., Lion suffered a blow that might have killed her. A 12-inch shell from Lützow hit the British flagship on its amidships Q turret between the two 13.5-inch guns, penetrated the 11-inch armor, burst inside, and blew off the front half of the armored roof. Most of the gun-house crew was killed instantly, and both legs of the turret captain, Major Francis J. W. Harvey of the Royal Marines, were crushed. Dying, but realizing the great danger to the ship, Harvey dragged himself to the voice pipe and called down to his crew below to close the magazine doors and flood the magazine. Then he sent the only walking survivor in the gun house, a marine sergeant, to the bridge to report that the turret was out of action. Worse was to happen. The shell explosion had jarred open the breech of the elevated left-side 13.5-inch gun and the already loaded powder charge in its silk bag slid back out of the gun breech and burst open on the floor. The scattered powder instantly ignited, sending a sheet of white flame rushing down the hoist toward the magazine. Seventy officers and men were incinerated, but because the magazine doors had been closed, the flash reversed itself and vomited out through the opened turret top. The ship was saved and Harvey won a posthumous Victoria Cross. A few minutes later, the dazed, blood-stained marine sergeant in burned clothing appeared on the bridge to tell the first officer he met, “Q turret has gone, sir. All the crew were killed and we have flooded the magazines.” Surprised, the officer looked back. “No further confirmation was necessary: the armored roof of Q turret had been folded back like an open sardine tin; thick yellow smoke was rolling up in clouds from the gaping hole, and the guns were cocked up in the air awkwardly. All this had happened within a few yards of where Beatty was standing and none of us on the bridge had heard the detonation.”
Five minutes later, at the rear of Beatty’s line, another British battle cruiser was badly hit and this time it brought catastrophe. Von der Tann had already fired forty-eight 11-inch shells at Indefatigable. Then she fired two more and the projectiles struck the British battle cruiser’s after superstructure. In New Zealand, just ahead, the navigating officer looked back at Indefatigable.
We were altering course to port at the time and it seemed as if her steering was damaged as she did not follow around in our wake but held on until she was about five hundred yards on our starboard quarter. While we were still looking at her, she was hit again by two shells, one on the forecastle and one on the fore turret. Both shells appeared to explode on impact. There was an interval of about thirty seconds and then the ship completely blew up. The main explosion started with sheets of flame, followed immediately by a dense dark smoke cloud which obscured the ship from view. All sorts of stuff was blown into the air, a fifty foot picket boat being blown up about two hundred feet, apparently intact though upside down.
Stricken, with smoke pouring from her shattered hull, Indefatigable rolled slowly onto her side, all the while driving through the water. Then the huge vessel turned completely over and plunged, taking with her 1,017 officers and men. Only two seamen survived, both shell-shocked and delirious when they were pulled from the sea hours later by a German destroyer. Curiously, because of the din of battle and because the Indefatigable was last in line, many in Beatty’s squadron were unaware of what had happened. FromLion’s bridge, an officer looked back to admire the following ships “with their huge bow waves and flashing broadsides. Astern of the rear ship was a colossal pall of grey smoke. I gazed in amazement and at the same time realised that there were only five battle cruisers in our line. Where was the sixth? The unpleasant truth dawned on me that the cloud of smoke was all that remained of the Indefatigable.” But the loss did not long affect the British squadron. “It happened so suddenly,” said a New Zealand officer, “that, almost before we realized she had gone, our attention was entirely absorbed in the fierce battle now progressing. The noise of our own salvos and the shriek of enemy shells falling over or short and throwing up great sheets of spray, left one with little time to think of anything except the work at hand.”
As the five remaining British battle cruisers steamed on through towering waterspouts, Lion took five more hits, one of which destroyed her main wireless transmitter. Beatty thereafter was able to communicate by wireless with his own ships and with Jellicoe only by passing his messages by flag or searchlight to the ship astern, Princess Royal, which then would relay them. Needing time to deal with the problems afflicting his squadron, Beatty eased his course to starboard, opening the range to 18,000 yards. His guns fell silent.
During this short lull, the cast in the drama changed. Since the battle began, Evan-Thomas had been pressing to catch up with Beatty, signaling his battleships that he wanted them to steam at 24½ knots. He was still eight miles behind the battle cruisers, but, as the Germans had only been making 18 to 20 knots, the superdreadnoughts were coming closer. The Germans saw him coming: “Behind the [British] battle cruiser line appeared four big ships,” said Hase. “We soon identified these as of the Queen Elizabeth class. There had been much talk in our fleet of these ships. They carried a colossal armament of eight 15-inch guns, 28,000 tons displacement and a speed of twenty-five knots. They fired a shell more than twice as heavy as ours. They engaged at portentous ranges.” Now, at 4:00 p.m., these mammoth 15-inch guns were coming within range of the rear ships of Hipper’s line. Visibility remained a problem: “Although out in the open sea there was maximum visibility and a bright sun shone down warmly on a sea smooth as a pond, the eastern horizon was shrouded in sea mist and even with the aid of a telescope no movement was discernible,” said a Warspite midshipman in the spotting top. Minutes later, two ships appeared through the haze, Von der Tann and Moltke, 19,000 yards away. It was enough to begin. The 5th Battle Squadron, meticulously schooled by Jellicoe at Scapa Flow, was one of the most accurate shooting squadrons in the Grand Fleet. After firing a few spotting rounds from the forward turrets of Barham, Valiant, andWarspite, Evan-Thomas turned 45 degrees to starboard, paralleling Hipper’s course. His gun turrets swung around to port, and at 4:10 p.m., after a few ranging shots, salvos of 15-inch shells thundered down on the two German battle cruisers, landing in the water so near their targets that the German hulls “quivered and reverberated.” Von der Tann was hit almost immediately by 1,920 pounds of steel and explosive, the shell ripping through her underwater armor, permitting 600 tons of seawater to flood into her after compartments. Then it was Moltke’s turn as one of these tremendous shells pierced her side armor, exploding in a coal bunker, igniting coal dust, and wrecking a 5.9-inch gun. A minute later, all four British battleships were within range. Barham and Valiantfired at Moltke; Warspite,adding her fire to New Zealand’s, shifted to Von der Tann, joined quickly by Malaya. To escape this dreadful bombardment, these two rearmost German battle cruisers began to zigzag, adversely affecting their own gunnery.
Meanwhile, despite their injuries, the British battle cruisers were shooting more accurately. At 4:14 p.m., Lion landed a salvo on Lützow; at 4:17 p.m., Queen Mary hit Seydlitz again, while New Zealand sent a 12-inch shell into Von der Tann’s forward turret, putting it out of action with jammed guns and a flooded magazine. Almost simultaneously, a 15-inch shell penetrated Von der Tann’s armored deck aft and beat through the barbette of the rear turret, putting it out of action. Even so, Von der Tann hit New Zealandagain, andMoltke struck back at Tiger. Fierce though this part of the battle was, the struggle at the head of the line was even more ferocious and punishing. Here, Derfflinger and Seydlitz together were concentrating twenty 12-inch guns on Queen Mary. InDerfflinger’s gunnery-control tower, Hase’s eyes were glued on this target:
The Queen Mary was firing less rapidly than we were but usually full salvos. I could see the shells coming and I had to admit that they were shooting superbly. As a rule, all eight shells fell together, but they were almost always over or short. . . . But the poor Queen Mary was having a bad time. In addition to Derfflinger, she was being engaged by Seyd-litz. . . . At 4.26 p.m. [she] met her doom. . . . First, a vivid red flame shot up from her forepart. Then came an explosion forward, followed by a much heavier explosion amidships. Black debris flew into the air and immediately afterwards the whole ship blew up with a terrific explosion. A gigantic cloud of smoke rose, the masts collapsed inwards, the smoke cloud hid everything and rose higher and higher. Finally, nothing but a thick, black cloud of smoke remained where the ship had been. At its base, the smoke column covered only a small area, but it widened towards the summit and looked like a monstrous pine tree.
Tiger, only 500 yards astern of Queen Mary and moving at 25 knots, had to maneuver abruptly to avoid a collision with the doomed ship. An officer on Tiger’s bridge had an intimate view of what happened: “I saw one salvo straddle her. Three shells out of four hit. . . . The next salvo straddled her and two more shells hit her. As they hit, I saw a dull red glow amidships and then the ship seemed to open out like a puffball or one of those toadstool things when one squeezes it. There was another dull red glow forwards and the whole ship seemed to collapse inwards. The funnels and masts fell into the middle, the roofs of the turrets were blown a hundred feet high. Tiger put her helm hard-a-starboard and we just cleared the remains of Queen Mary’s stern by a few feet.”
New Zealand, following Tiger at high speed, saw Tiger turning to starboard and immediately turned sharply to port to avoid the wreck. From New Zealand’s conning tower an officer reported:
We disappeared in this dense mass of smoke and Tiger and ourselves passed one on either side of Queen Mary. We passed her about fifty yards on our port beam by which time the smoke had blown clear, revealing the stern . . . afloat, and the propellers still revolving, but the forward part had already gone under. . . . Men were crawling out of the top of the after turret and up the after hatchway. When we were abreast and only a hundred and fifty yards away, this after portion rolled over and, as it did so, blew up. The moist noticeable thing was the masses and masses of paper which were blown into the air. . . . Great masses of iron were thrown into the air and things were falling into the sea around us. Up in the air two hundred feet high [was] a boat which may have been a dinghy or a pinnace still intact but upside down. . . . Before we had passed, the Queen Mary had completely disappeared. This second disaster was rather stunning, but the only signal coming from the flagship was, “Battle cruisers alter course two points to port”—that is, towards the enemy.
[Neither the charts nor the detailed record of Official Naval Despatches published after Jutland include this command or alteration of course. Nevertheless, it has become a part of the Beatty legend.]
For those watching from Lion’s bridge, the horrors seemed to continue. Immediately after Queen Mary blew up, Princess Royal was straddled and disappeared into a forest of towering waterspouts. A Lion signalman stared in dismay and reported, “Princess Royalblown up, sir.” Beatty, turning to Chatfield, shook his head and said, “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.” Then Princess Royal reappeared intact from behind the massive curtains of smoke and spray.
Beatty, who had just lost a 26,000-ton battle cruiser and an 18,500-ton battle cruiser along with their crews totaling more than 2,000 men, realized that he needed help. Twelve British destroyers, led by Captain Barry Bingham in Nestor, had reached a point to deliver a torpedo attack on Hip-per’s battle cruisers, and at 4:15 p.m., Beatty signaled them to go forward. The British destroyers charged at 34 knots. From Lützow’s bridge, Hipper watched the attack develop; he countered by sending his light cruiserRegensburg with fifteen destroyers dashing out at 30 knots to meet Bingham. On both sides, the massed torpedo attacks on the enemy’s capital ships quickly dissolved into numerous individual small ship battles. Churning white foam, their signal flags whipping frantically in the wind, their 4-inch guns banging incessantly, the little ships lunged at one another in the no-man’s-land between the lines of big ships. During this melee, each side launched torpedoes, but the British battle cruisers and battleships managed to avoid all eighteen torpedoes fired by the German destroyers and, by turning away, Hipper’s big ships successfully evaded nineteen of the twenty torpedoes launched by the British. Somehow, one British torpedo found Seydlitz, exploding on her port side near the forward turret and tearing a hole forty feet long and thirteen feet wide in her side plating. Although she took in hundreds of tons of water and listed to port, the splendidly constructed German battle cruiser was able to maintain speed and hold her place in line. The tumult brought casualties to the destroyers on both sides: Nestor and Nomad, each hit in a boiler, halted under clouds of escaping steam, and later both sank. The German destroyers V-27 and V-29 were also sunk. At 4:43 p.m., Beatty terminated the encounter by recalling his destroyers. As the British destroyers turned back, their captains saw something incredible: Beatty and his battle cruisers were giving up their pursuit of Hipper to the southeast. They were reversing course and heading north. Apparently, Beatty was running away.
From his damaged flagship, Beatty now led only four battle cruisers. Exposed on Lion’s open compass platform, soaked by spray while shrapnel screamed around him, he seemed to his staff a heroic figure. Nevertheless, in the Run to the South, this first phase of the Battle of Jutland, Beatty was clearly the loser and Hipper the victor. The German admiral, commanding an inferior force, had sunk two British battle cruisers and two British destroyers at a cost of only two German destroyers. Hipper’s position remained difficult—he had begun with five heavy ships against ten; now it was five against eight—but the German plan was succeeding and every ninety seconds brought his unsuspecting enemies one mile closer to the sixteen dreadnoughts of the High Seas Fleet. When the battle began at 3:48 p.m., Hipper and Scheer had been forty-seven miles apart; now, an hour later, Hipper at last saw in the distance ahead of him the welcome sight of Scheer’s long, pale gray column. Glad as he was, Hipper now anticipated a larger victory. Beatty, hungry for battle, had impatiently taken Hipper’s lure and done what the German admirals had hoped he would do: charge impetuously into a German trap. Smoothly, Franz Hipper swung his battle cruisers around 180 degrees and took up his normal battle position at the head of the northbound High Seas Fleet.
During the fifty-five-minute Run to the South, Beatty’s three light cruiser squadrons—twelve vessels in all—which had been left behind by the admiral’s turn to the southeast, had been straining to catch up and take their proper scouting positions ahead of Lion.In the new alignment, the veteran Commodore William Goodenough understood exactly where his place should be. “Those of us who had been in action with Sir David Beatty before knew that his general principle was to get between the enemy and his base,” said Goodenough. “I therefore had no difficulty in shaping a course to the southeast.” By 4:35 p.m., Goodenough’s 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron was the most southerly of the three squadrons. Then, from his flagship Southampton, the commodore sighted farther to the southeast something no British seaman had ever seen before: the entire High Seas Fleet at sea, dozens of light gray ships, large and small, steaming against a background of gray water and gray sky, all belching black smoke and steaming in his direction.
“We saw ahead of us first smoke, then masts, then ships . . . sixteen battleships with destroyers around them on each bow,” Goodenough continued. “We hung on for a few moments to make sure before confirming the message. Then my commander, efficient and cool, said, ‘If you’re going to make that signal, you’d better make it now, sir. You may never make another.’ ” Goodenough saw the reasoning and at 4:38, he flashed an electrifying wireless signal to Beatty and Jellicoe: “URGENT. PRIORITY. Have sighted enemy battle fleet, bearing approximately southeast.” For Beatty, rushing toward this mighty force, and for Jellicoe pacing the bridge of Iron Duke fifty miles away, this signal instantly changed their perceptions of the situation. It made twaddle of the Admiralty’s noon signal that the Friedrich der Grosse was anchored in the Jade. Instead, Scheer was here, in the North Sea, 180 miles from the Jade and only a few miles from Beatty. The British battle cruisers, already severely punished and diminished in number by Hipper, were about to face the massed guns of the High Seas Fleet.
Hipper could be pleased: he had splendidly carried out his mission. He had led Beatty’s battered and diminished battle cruiser force, along with the lonely 5th Battle Squadron, into the arms of the High Seas Fleet. It seemed a moment of victory for the Imperial Navy, what the German people, the navy, and the kaiser had been awaiting for twenty years. But the real situation was not as Hipper imagined it. Standing on Lützow’s compass platform and watching Beatty’s wounded flagship lead her remaining sisters into his “trap,” the German admiral may have pictured Beatty suddenly dismayed by what was happening. In fact, Beatty had recognized the opportunity the Germans now laid before him. Here was his chance: with luck, he could turn and lure the High Seas Fleet into an ambush deadlier than anything the Germans might have prepared for him. Hipper and Scheer, Beatty was certain, had no idea what gigantic force lay over the northern horizon. If he turned north, seeming to flee, he could, with his superior speed, draw ahead. The 5th Battle Squadron, with its stout armor and powerful guns, would follow behind as both additional bait and a sturdy shield, keeping the Germans engaged. And then, in a little over an hour, he would rendezvous with Jellicoe. Scheer would come north confidently expecting to conduct a massacre. And a massacre would occur, but not in the form the German admirals expected.
Goodenough had not immediately turned after spotting and reporting the presence of the High Seas Fleet. Instead, wanting to report accurately the number, course, and speed of the enemy ships, he and his four light cruisers continued at 25 knots toward Scheer until they were only 13,000 yards away from the German battleships. Oddly, as the four light cruisers came closer, the Germans did not open fire. The reason was not visibility; Scheer himself later wrote that at 4:30 p.m., “the weather was extremely clear, the sky cloudless, a light breeze and a calm sea.” Goodenough was spared because the German battleships could see the four cruisers only bow-on, a view from which one cruiser looks much like another and these ships, the Germans thought, could easily be German. Finally, at 4:48 p.m., satisfied with what he had seen, Goodenough wirelessed another URGENT PRIORITY signal to Beatty and Jellicoe: “Course of enemy’s battle fleet is north, single line-ahead. Composition of van is Kaiser class. . . . Destroyers on both wings and ahead. Enemy’s battle cruisers joining battle fleet from the north.” Then, duty performed, Goodenough turned his own ships away, displaying their unmistakably British four-funneled profiles. Ten German battleships immediately opened fire. Twisting and turning between the waterspouts, the British cruisers fled. One officer estimated that forty large shells fell within seventy-five yards of Southampton: “I can truthfully say that I thought that each moment would be our last. . . . We seemed to bear a charmed life. . . . How we escaped amazes everyone from the Commodore downwards.” In fact, the miracle was the commodore’s doing. Asked later how he managed to avoid being hit, Goodenough replied, “Simply by steering straight for the splashes of the last enemy salvo!”—his thought being that, with the German gunners making constant corrections, the next salvo was unlikely to land in the same place as the one just before.
Beatty, after receiving Goodenough’s first signal reporting the presence of the High Seas Fleet, held on to the southeast for two minutes in order to see for himself the masts of the German battleships twelve miles away. Then at 4:40 p.m., a flag hoist ran upLion’s signal halyard: “Alter course in succession 16 points [180 degrees] to starboard.” The flags were hauled down, the flagship’s helm went over, and Lion, followed in turn by Princess Royal, Tiger, and New Zealand, drew a massive curve on the surface of the sea, straightening out on a reverse course, now to the northwest. By turning in succession, each on the same point, Beatty risked bringing all four of his ships one by one under the concentrated fire of the oncoming enemy battle fleet. All managed without harm, althoughNew Zealand, at the tail of Beatty’s line, did so by intelligently turning ahead of time on her own, before the German battleships came within range. Beatty’s turrets trained around from port to starboard, and a few minutes later the duel with Hipper resumed on an opposite course, giving this phase of the battle the name of the Run to the North. Beatty was fortunate that, despite the momentum of his charge to the south, the two-minute delay to see for himself, and then his choice of a turn in succession, his squadron had pivoted just beyond the range of the leading battleships of the High Seas Fleet, Admiral Paul Behncke’s elite Königs. Still the German dreadnoughts, now only 20,000 yards away, were steaming hard, their guns at maximum elevation, awaiting the order to fire.
When, at 4:40 p.m., Lion hoisted the flag signal for a turn to the north, Evan-Thomas on Barham, seven miles astern of the flagship and already firing at the rear ships in Hipper’s line, missed or was once again unable to read Beatty’s flags. Neither Lion norTigerpassed the signal to Barham by searchlight, so the four superdreadnoughts continued steaming on course southeast, straight toward Scheer. The error or difficulty on Barham’s bridge was compounded by an error on Lion’s. Once the signal flag commanding a turn was hauled down at 4:41 p.m. and Lion actually began to turn, no one on the flagship’s bridge noticed that the 5th Battle Squadron continued racing south. It was not until 4:48, as the southbound battleships actually passed the northbound battle cruisers a mile and a half apart on an opposite course—and with Beatty’s squadron traveling at 26 knots and Evan-Thomas’s at 24, they charged by each other at a combined closing speed of 60 miles an hour—that Beatty saw and understood what had happened and repeated his turn-in-succession signal—again by flag hoist—to Evan-Thomas. Then the Lion’s signal staff—Ralph Seymour was the officer responsible—made another, more damaging error. The flags dictating that the 5th Battle Squadron turn were hoisted at 4:48. Because Seymour forgot or was distracted, they were not hauled down until 4:54. During this six minutes while Evan-Thomas awaited his superior’s command, his four dreadnoughts continued steaming toward the High Seas Fleet. By the time Seymour finally hauled down the flags, Evan-Thomas was 4,000 yards closer to Scheer, within gun range of the leading dreadnoughts of the German battle line. Warspite’s executive officer described the sequence:
I suddenly saw our battle cruisers coming close by about half a mile away, going in the opposite direction and I realized that they had turned back. I noticed that Queen Mary and Indefatigable were . . . [missing] but never realized that they had been sunk. . . . “X” turret of Lion was askew and trained towards us [that is, away from the enemy], the guns at full elevation, several hits showing on her port side. . . . Then we turned . . . [180 degrees] and trained the turret around full speed. Very soon after the turn, I saw on the starboard quarter the whole of the High Seas Fleet—masts, funnels and an endless ripple of orange flashes all down the line. . . . I felt one or two very heavy shakes but it never occurred to me that we were being hit. . . . I distinctly saw two of our salvos hit the leading German battleship. Sheets of yellow flame went right over her masts and she looked red fore and aft like a burning haystack. I know we hit her hard.
When Beatty’s command to turn had finally been given and received, Evan-Thomas in Barham led his dreadnoughts around, one after the other. As each turned on the same spot, wheeling in a semicircle 1,000 yards from a fixed point in the water, the onrushing Germans brought a concentrated fire on the British battleships. Barham was hit; Valiant was luckier and got around without being touched; Warspite was hit three times; and Malaya, the rear ship, received the concentrated fire of many German battleships. “The turning point was a very hot corner,” said one of her turret officers. “It is doubtful if we, the last ship of the line, could have got through without a severe hammering if the captain had not used his initiative and turned the ship early.”
After their turn to the north, Beatty’s battle cruisers also continued to suffer. Soon after the turn, Lion and Tiger were hit by Lützow and Seydlitz, and Beatty steered to port to put off the enemy range finders. Lion found herself passing through the wide patch of oil and floating wreckage where Queen Mary had gone down forty minutes earlier; it seemed possible that before long she might join her sister on the bottom. Already she had been hit by thirteen heavy shells; now came two more. Nor was Lion’s wounding unique:Tiger had been hit seventeen times, Princess Royal almost as many. Of Beatty’s four remaining battle cruisers, only New Zealand had escaped relatively unharmed. On the damaged battle cruisers, fires were burning, but because shell fragments had slashed fire hoses, it was difficult to bring water to the flames. Wounded men lay in the twisted wreckage until stretcher parties could pry them free and carry them to dressing stations. There, doctors sawed and stitched. In Princess Royal, a surgeon amputating a foot noted that the dim light of oil lanterns made “the securing of arteries particularly difficult.” Nevertheless, in all four ships, the engines remained undamaged and, taking advantage of their superior speed, Beatty steered northwest at 24 knots, leaving the battle behind. Once out of range, he reduced speed and for half an hour, during which his battered ships did not fire a shot, his crews attempted to control fires, clear away wreckage, restore turrets, and transform their vessels back into warships. On Princess Royal, a midshipman recorded that at 5:15 there was “a lull in the action and people were going out to stretch their legs and get a little fresh air. At 5.25, the flagship signaled ‘Prepare to renew the action’ and at 5.43 we opened fire again.” On one battle cruiser, the resumption of the battle caught the ship’s paymaster by surprise. He had come on deck for some fresh air and was standing on the forward superstructure when P turret suddenly opened fire. The blast stripped off his trousers.
Meanwhile, the battle cruisers’ withdrawal and time-out had left the 5th Battle Squadron to fight alone against Hipper’s five battle cruisers and the four powerful dreadnoughts leading Scheer’s 3rd Battle Squadron. This hour—from a few minutes before five o’clock, when the Queen Elizabeths wheeled north three miles in Beatty’s wake, until just after six, when they joined the Grand Fleet battle line—was their time of glory. “When we turned,” said a turret officer on Malaya, “I saw our battle cruisers proceeding north at full speed, already seven or eight thousand yards ahead of us. I then realized that just the four of us of the 5th Battle Squadron would have to entertain the High Seas Fleet—four against perhaps twenty.” Steaming at 25 knots, Evan-Thomas distributed the fire of his four ships: Barham and Valiant were to deal with the five German battle cruisers up ahead, while Warspite and Malaya took on the four Königs coming up behind. At the head of the German battle line, Behncke and his four formidable Königs—König, Grosser Kurfürst, Kronprinz Wilhelm, and Markgraf—pressed forward to the limit of their stokers’ ability to shovel coal. All the while, their total of forty 12-inch guns lashed out. Barham was the first to be struck; then she was hit again; then four more times. A heavy shell wrecked her auxiliary wireless office and inflicted casualties on both wireless and medical personnel. One shell burst caused a fire in a 6-inch gun casement; a junior officer fought the fire “until swelling from burns closed his eyes.” A shell fragment all but severed the leg of the ship’s assistant navigator; his midshipman “did his best to tie a tourniquet, but he was much handicapped owing to the lights going out. The navigator died quickly from loss of blood.” “Six, eight, nine salvos a minute” were falling around Malaya;between 5:20 and 5:35 p.m., the battleship was hit five times. One 12-inch shell peeled back the roof of her X turret, but inside the gun crews continued to work; another heavy shell pierced the starboard side below the waterline, admitting enough water to give the ship a starboard list. Within half an hour, Malaya suffered 100 casualties. “Everything was dark chaos,” said one of the officers of a 6-inch gun battery. “Most of the wounded had been taken away, but several of the killed were still there . . . [and] the smell of burnt human flesh remained in the ship for weeks giving everybody a sickly nauseous feeling.” In Warspite, the chief surgeon ordered burns to be dressed with pre-prepared picric acid gauze. “The effect was agonizing—picric acid only aggravated the burns—and the patients tore off the bandages.” Thereafter, the victims lay in “restless agony . . . injections of morphine seemed to have very little effect on them.” About this time, a 12-inch shell penetrated into the storage place for fresh meat and hit the armored grating over B boiler room. “On its way through the beef screen, it had carried a whole sheep with it which was wedged into the gratings. At first I thought it was a human casualty,” said the ship’s executive officer, moving around to inspect damage. A few compartments away, he found real human casualties: “three stokers dead, one having his head blown off and another badly smashed to pieces. Rather a horrible sight, but the burnt ones were far worse.”
The human carnage and physical damage to the ships were bad enough, but for Evan-Thomas, his captains, and the crews themselves, worse was possible. The entire High Seas Fleet—Hipper’s five battle cruisers and light cruisers, Scheer’s sixteen dreadnoughts, six predreadnoughts, and dozens of destroyers—was rushing up behind them and if, at any moment during their 180-degree turn or their subsequent passage north, any one of the four British superdreadnoughts had been disabled, she must have shared the fate ofBlücher at the Dogger Bank. Only one unlucky shell would have been required. It would not have been necessary to blow up the ship in a single cataclysm, as had happened with Indefatigable and Queen Mary. A more modest hit damaging the propulsion machinery or steering gear would have sufficed. And then the wounded ship would have been gobbled up. Moreover, should Evan-Thomas have decided at that point not to abandon the victim but instead to turn his squadron back to help, then perhaps all four of his ships would have been lost—although a German dreadnought or two might have been taken to the bottom with them. In any case, Scheer would have won the victory he desired, and a powerful, isolated squadron of the Grand Fleet would have been destroyed.
Hit after hit crashed into the four British battleships, but all the while, their thirty-two 15-inch guns roared back. During the Run to the North, Evan-Thomas’s four dreadnoughts hit three of Hipper’s battle cruisers and three of Behncke’s battleships with 1,900-pound shells. Barham and Valiant scored hits on Seydlitz, Lützow, and Derfflinger, while Warspite and Malaya fired at König, Grosser Kurfürst, and Markgraf. Hits on Lützow’s main and reserve wireless stations severed these communication links to the other ships in Hipper’s squadron. But, again, it was Seydlitz that suffered most. She was stripped of much of her fighting power, battered, listing to port, down by the bow from her torpedo wound; the question now was whether she could survive.
Briefly, at the start of the Run to the North, Von der Tann had made herself useful; firing at Barham, she had scored one hit, but then she had to give up. Her fore and aft turrets were already out of action and now her starboard waist turret, the only one that would bear on the enemy, gave out as well. The guns had become so hot that they jammed in their slides and would not return to firing positions. Captain Hans Zenker realized that his ship was no longer a fighting unit, but he kept on with Hipper to prevent concentration of enemy fire on the other ships of the squadron. At 5:30 p.m., Lützow and Derfflinger were hit again, and the fire of the German battle cruisers began to slacken. German gunners now had a setting sun glaring in their eyes, making ranging and spotting difficult.
Nevertheless, to Scheer it looked at this moment as if Beatty and Evan-Thomas were beaten. Hipper already had sunk two British battle cruisers; Lion, the enemy flagship, had been streaming smoke from a gaping wound for more than an hour; and Beatty’s movement looked very much like flight. If Scheer could severely damage another battle cruiser or one of the Queen Elizabeths and then overtake and sink it, the victory he had planned would be won. Thus, Scheer vigorously urged his ships forward. At 5:20 p.m., confident that he faced no more than two isolated British squadrons and believing that a beaten opponent was escaping, he signaled “Give chase” and his whole fleet strained forward in pursuit. The four leading ships—König, Grosser Kurfürst, Kronprinz Wilhelm,and Markgraf—under Rear Admiral Paul Behncke began to draw ahead as the engine-room staffs strove for more and more speed. The slower dreadnoughts followed as well as they could, while the six predreadnoughts of the 2nd Squadron fell farther and farther astern. The long line of the High Seas Fleet straggled over twenty-five miles of sea. It did no good. Hipper’s battle cruisers could not maintain more than 25 knots for any length of time, while Beatty’s Cats, with their 28-knot speed, left them behind and drew out of sight.
When Beatty ended his battle cruisers’ respite and signaled “Prepare to renew the action,” he swung his ships from north to northeast and Hipper saw again in the mist on his port bow the distinct shapes of his old enemies. The German admiral was profoundly frustrated. Lützow’s wireless had been destroyed and now, when he wanted to report Beatty’s reappearance, he could not; Scheer in Friedrich der Grosse was ten miles astern, beyond visual signal distance. The best he could do was send a man up into an exposed position to make wigwag semaphore signals to Derfflinger astern, to pass the news along. Meanwhile, Beatty, 14,000 yards away, was relentlessly crossing in front of him, bending back the German van to starboard. Hipper, unwilling to permit Beatty to cross his bow, had no choice but to give ground, swinging his own ships also to starboard, toward the east. This time visibility as well as firepower favored the British. “I had to work against a blinding sunset in the western sky and devastating enemy artillery,” Hipper said later. “The sun stood deep and the horizon was hazy and I had to fire directly into the sun. I saw absolutely nothing of the enemy, who was behind a dense cloud of smoke—the gunnery officers could find no target although we made a superb one ourselves. There was nothing else to do but take the ships out of the battle for a while.” As Hipper continually gave more ground, turning farther to the east, the whole of the German fleet now stretched out behind him in a vast, shallow curve. In the rear, more than twenty miles behind, Mauve’s old predreadnoughts still steamed northwest; in the van, Hipper in Lützow, six miles in advance of König, kept swinging east as Beatty relentlessly bore down on his van.
The second round of the battle—the Run to the North—came to a close around 5:45 p.m., when one of Beatty’s lookouts and then Beatty himself caught sight of the advance guard of the Grand Fleet in the distant form of the armored cruiser Black Princeoperating on the far right wing—the southwestern edge—of Jellicoe’s forward cruiser screen. Now Beatty knew that Jellicoe was close over the horizon; he knew also that Scheer, straining to catch him, was unaware of this peril. Possessing this knowledge, Beatty grimly altered course again to starboard, pressing even more heavily down on Hipper in order to deflect him from seeing the oncoming threat.
By now, the deteriorating weather had begun to exercise a dominant influence on the battle. Ironically, because of the weather, Hipper, whose mission was to scout and warn the High Seas Fleet of peril ahead, learned the next piece of dreadful news—the worst that either German admiral would hear all day—after Scheer had heard it. The smoke pouring out of funnels and gun barrels, mixing with the blowing wet mist, formed a heavy surface cloud, which moved across the battlefield creating patches of dense, sometimes nearly impenetrable haze. Hipper, steering east, was in one of these patches and therefore knew nothing of any hostile ships other than Beatty’s four battle cruisers and Evan-Thomas’s four superdreadnoughts. For the moment, as he swung to starboard, he and his own battle cruisers were hidden from Beatty. Three miles ahead of him to the east were Bödicker’s four light cruisers; at 5:50 p.m., Hipper received a signal that they were in action with a single enemy cruiser. Five minutes later, Bödicker gave Hipper a shock: his light cruisers, he reported, now were in action with a group of British dreadnoughts to the east. Dreadnoughts? To the east? This could not be Beatty or Evan-Thomas. This was somebody else.
Moments later on König’s bridge, Rear Admiral Behncke, at the head of the German battleship line, suffered a shock greater than Hipper’s. At 5:50 p.m., König and her sisters, still believing that they were in pursuit of the fleeing Beatty, raced into a large patch of thick mist. At 5:59 p.m., they emerged from it to behold a terrible sight: the Grand Fleet spread before them across the northern horizon. Twenty-four British dreadnoughts and a host of cruisers and destroyers were 16,000 yards away, racing toward them at 20 knots.